Tuesday, June 2, 2015

Canadian beef traceability found lacking

Canada’s
beef-industry traceability program comes up short in a study comparing it with
the National Livestock Identification System in Australia.

Authors Martin Gooch,
Delia Bucknell and Grain Stewart say bluntly at the beginning of their report
that “compared to Australia’s NLIS, Canada does not have an effective beef
traceability system at an industry level.”

Canada has so far
borne all of the costs of beginning a traceability system, but has gained few
of the potential benefits.

“Compared to NLIS,
Canada’s systems and capabilities do not offer the same proactive value,” the
report says.

The Canadian system
needs many improvements including, the inclusion of more information, standardization
across Canada and enforcement.-

The various
provincial systems don’t all report movements or transfers of ownership; only
Quebec is enforcing both as mandatory requirements.

The goal is to make
movement tracking mandatory at the federal level by next year, but this study
says it’s “unlikely to be introduced before 2018.

“These and other
factors have created what could be described as a culture of inertia,” the
report says. As a result, “considerable amounts of funds (have
been) invested in the development of systems and practices that did not achieve
their stated goals."

Much could be gained
by adding on-farm information, including weights, medications and feeding
regimes.

The report notes that
the Beef Farmers of Ontario’s Beef Quality Assurance Program has many of the
features that would return more value for farmers and the industry.

It is, however, a
voluntary program with low adoption by smaller-scale producers and by cow-calf
operations.

“The estimated price
of on farm traceability (weigh bars, reader, and software) ranges from $4,000
to 6,000 dollars. For comparative purposes, the
Australian KoolCollect software, which was described in the
NLIS case study, ranges from $600 to $3,200, depending on
the features required by the user. This does not
include the cost of weigh bars and

readers.”

Canada’s system was
apparently set up mainly to assure export markets that Canada could handle an
outbreak of a disease such as BSE (Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy).

It did not address
the opportunity to make many efficiency and productivity gains, such as genetic
performance, assurance of food safety by tracking drug withdrawal periods and
links between management and meat value.

The report was
prepared by the Value Chain Management Centre with funding support from the
federal and provincial governments.